Monday, May 20, 2013

Here's
a good reason to cancel the debts of impoverished countries: in many cases,
their populations never chose to borrow the money in the first place.

This
is a supposedly radical notion.Lots of
institutions and global actors, from the World Bank and IMF to western
politicians to non-profit organizations, talk about “debt relief,” but very few
talk about the legitimacy of the debt to begin with.Debt relief or forgiveness is packaged as a
sympathetic bit of charity from the West to the world’s poor, an act of kindness
that is usually attached to demands made of the recipient government.Those demands range from the hypocritical (“stop
subsidizing your farmers…only we get to do that”) to the patronizing (“demonstrateto us in writing how you will properly spend your own money that we are allowing you to keep”) to the counter-productive (“commit to austerity…”).

Even
those actors sympathetic to the cause of debt relief because of the impact it could have, including increased spending on health, education, and infrastructure
and the accompanying decline in preventable mortality, often shy away from
making the claim that debt relief should be a right and not a privilege.This not only lets numerous people off the
hook who should not be let off the hook, it is a complete distortion of
history.And history matters.

In
Africa, the vast majority of debt was accrued in the 1970’s and 1980’s under
dictatorships, many of which were tossed from power in the 1990’s.The lending that created this debt financed
many things, but was almost universally processed through un-democratic
channels.In many cases, it financed the
dictator’s personal consumption habits.In many cases, it financed the repressive organs of the state, which in
turn suppressed dissent and preserved the dictator’s power.In many cases, it was used to dispense
patronage to internal actors who might otherwise have challenged the status
quo.In the end, this lending helped
perpetuate the rule of tyrants while doing significantly more harm than good
for the populations subjected to that rule.It funded weapons that killed children, “development” projects that destroyed communities, and further enriched some of the richest people on earth
at the expense of some of the poorest.This is the debt that developing nations are being asked to pay back today.

In
fact, the story of debt in Africa is so uniform across so many countries as to
allow for the discernment of a system at work.Foreign nations help a dictator take power for political reasons, and
then fund his regime to ensure it can repel any attempt at a change in
government.Lending funds the security
services, the patronage network, and the dictator’s personal spending habits,
which become very lavish, very quickly.Resource extraction is streamlined at the expense of the domestic
economy and to the benefit of multi-national corporations while structural
adjustment programs imposed as part of debt restructuring agreements crater the
middle class and the civil service.With
the economy in free fall, money starts to flow outward in the form of capital
flight, further draining the economy and obliterating the tax base.Protests are squashed with external support.Banks lend money knowing full well it will be
stolen because they make money off the lending anyway.Governments send arms and soldiers to assist
brutal tyrants.And then, when it’s
finally all over and the nightmare of dictatorship is somehow broken by the
will of the people, the banks and the rich governments and the multi-lateral
institutions cough loudly and ask to be paid back.

Speaking
of Africa as if it is a single place is, of course, absurd; this is a massive
continent of enormous ethnic, religious, racial, social, and cultural
diversity.And yet this same scenario played
out over and over again.It happened in
South Africa, where western institutions now demand that the ANC repay the
debts of its Apartheid predecessors.It
happened in Rwanda, where France systematically armed and supported the
genocidal regime around President Juvenal Habyarimana; today, Rwanda’s
government, whatever its faults, continues to pay off the debts of its
murderous predecessor.It happened in
Somalia, where a brutal dictatorship armed alternatively by the Americans and
the Soviets was replaced by two decades of famine and anarchy, and where the
newly emerging government is being lectured by the IMF to pay back what “it” “owes” to the West.

And,
on an unimaginable scale, it happened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
where America’s favorite “anti-communist” dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, looted
his country for more than thirty years, leaving it in ruins.Mobutu stole billions during his time in
office, funneling money from kickbacks, loans, fraudulent development projects,
and even straight from the country’s budget into his own pocket.He spent state money to take his inner circle
to Disneyworld and to ferry, on multiple occasions, a number of sheep from
Venezuela to his personal farm in the DRC.When asked if it was true, despite the suffering of his people, that he
was the fourth richest person in the world, Mobutu became indignant and
proclaimed, “no, no, no! I am the third
richest man in the world!”When the
rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front began to advance on his good friend Habyarimana
and his genocidal Hutu Power clique, Mobutu lectured him by saying “I
told you not to build any roads…building roads never did any good…I’ve been in
power in Zaire for thirty years and I never built one road.Now they are driving down them to get you.”This is the man George H. W. Bush invited to
the White House before any other African leader (he had at least 45 other
options).This is the man Ronald Reagan
declared was a “consistent voice of good sense and good will.”

When
Mobutu was forced from power, the DRC was more than $12 billion in debt, while
the former dictator was rumored to have as much as $8 billion in personal
wealth stashed abroad.The new Congolese
government set about to recover this wealth, claiming correctly that it
belonged to the Congolese people, but Swiss banks were sadly unable to recover
much of it.In Malawi, a similar
situation unfolded after the death of autocrat Hastings Banda.The banks told the Malawian government that
they would be happy to investigate Banda’s riches if the government could
simply produce a death certificate.Sadly, this certificate went “missing.”None of this should be surprising.After all, if Swiss banks just handed over their clients’ money simply
because it was stolen from orphans and teachers and farmers, they wouldn’t be Swiss banks.

The
creditors (banks, governments, multi-laterals) bear much of the responsibility for
this system, of course, a fact I covered in more detail here.But if we are keeping up the charade that
these debts are owed to somebody, then the people who need to pay them back are
the Mobutus and Bandas of the world.Their money is somewhere, and somebody is profiting from it.To claim that these debts are somehow
legitimately tied to the people of Malawi or the DRC is nonsensical.To say that these dictators represented their
people in any way that carries any validity in the real world is equivalent to
suggesting that Stalin was the legitimate representative of post-war
Poland.When you conquer a country and
subjugate its people, does it really matter whether you live there yourself or
not?

Jubilee
USA is one organization that gets it.While advocating for the one-time cancellation of all debts, a concept with
biblical precedence, Jubilee also argues consistently that much of the debt
owed by developing nations is illegitimate, a fact that puts phrases like “debt
relief” and “debt forgiveness” into a very different light.The fact that Jubilee is an incredibly
effective organization run on a tiny budget lends additional moral credibility
to its calls for change.Donations are helpful, of course, but there are lots of ways to get involved with Jubilee’s work.

Hastings Banda once called his political opponents “food for
crocodiles.”Margaret Thatcher once
called Banda’s government “one of our closest friends.”In short, the West helped feed Africa’s people
to the crocodiles, then peered inside the belly of the beast and yelled “don’t
forget to pay us back for all the money we spent raising crocodiles!”In fairness to the creditors, they are owed quite a bit of money.After all, as Mobutu taught the world so vividly,
one can spend an absolute fortune flying sheep around the world on private
jets.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Recently a friend of mine asked me my opinion on
whether or not donating aid to Africa is actually helpful for Africans.
He is involved in a church project that donates supplies to Swaziland,
he said, but he didn't know if his help was doing any good and he
figured he would ask around for perspectives. I told him that I had no
idea, of course, exactly what the impact was of donating goods to
Swaziland, but I did know that Swaziland is ruled by a corrupt King who
suppresses democratic rights, owns a hugely disproportionate share of
his country's wealth and, for what it's worth, occasionally marries
teenage girls against the wishes of their parents.

If you want to help Swaziland, I argued, the
best way might be to pressure Coca Cola, the largest multi-national
invested in the country, to pressure King Mswati to open up the
government. Until that happens, there is little hope for economic
reforms that will benefit the population as a whole and that would
negate the need for donations from people living ten thousand miles
away.

My friend said he understood that, but there was a
problem. "I want to help," he said "and that's not really the way I
envision helping. If I'm completely honest with myself, I envision
flying into the jungle on a helicopter and saving people."

While my friend deserves credit for being honest about
this, his admission that this urge is potentially self-serving is
entirely accurate. He's also not alone. From Kony 2012 to "Save the
Children" to the adoption craze rising and then crashing and burning in
country after country, it is evident that many in the West see their
role vis a vis Africans as one of spiritual, physical, and societal
salvation. For those in the West wanting to help Africans living in
poverty, understanding this dynamic and its implications has to be the
first step.

To be clear, wanting to help people is obviously a good thing,
and people who want to help should be commended, not condemned. The
old saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions was
clearly not coined by somebody familiar with Africa's post-colonial
history; Africa's road to poverty and conflict has been paved by people
with decidedly bad intentions, from Joseph Kony to CIA operatives, from
the executives at Shell Oil to the architects of Hutu Power.

But good intentions are not enough. Donated goods can
undercut local economies, enrich warlords, and even exacerbate the very
problems such donations are intended to solve. On a macro-level,
millions of dollars of aid from western countries to African nations
doesn't seem to have demonstrably improved the lives of Africa's
people. All of which is very frustrating to the person in the West who
just wants to help.

So how can Westerners help?

Answering that question begins by asking a different question: why do some people in Africa need help in the first place?

To
the World Bank, and other major practitioners of "development,"
Africans need help because they are lacking technical expertise and
resources. In Lesotho, for instance, anthropologist James Ferguson
described how the World Bank undertook an enormous project aimed at
connecting a rural area to the rest of the country in an effort to
improve local herders' ability to sell their livestock at the market.
Clearly, if only these Africans knew how to better leverage their
resources and if only they had the money to build a road, their lives
would dramatically improve!

Well, as it turns out, the men of the area didn't want
to sell their livestock because the disposable income would then be
turned over to their wives while the men were away working in South
Africa as seasonal laborers. They very much preferred to use the
livestock to barter within their own community. As for the road, the
major change it seems to have accomplished is the extension of state
power over an area that otherwise had been spared the day-to-day
manifestations of the machinations of a corrupt party apparatus running
the country.

This is what happens when you assume that people are poor
because they are stupid, ignorant, or lacking, say, the right farming
implement. "Development," as Ferguson argues, consistently seems to
perpetuate itself in a world in which political explanations for poverty
are ignored and replaced with "technical" ones. People are poor, in
this logic, because they lack the right farming equipment, not because
they lack the ability to influence how their government distributes the
right farming equipment. And it is highly unpopular to question this
logic. After all, in the words of Brazilian Archbishop Helder
Camara, "when I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask
why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."

The same goes for disaster relief, which can save lives,
but which never seems to be accompanied by the question of why Africans
are perpetually faced with famine and starvation and thus in need of
help, except occasionally by the racist, ignorant segment of the
population that demands to know why we in the West are wasting our money
on "those people." One major reason for famines in Africa is IMF
policy; loans are often attached to conditions that include the
reduction or elimination of government intervention in the economy,
often with disastrous results for food security.

The hypocrisy of this is stunning: US agribusiness is heavily
subsidized by the American government, but if Malawi wants to pay its
people to grow food, the IMF will punish it by demanding harsh repayment
on debts that were mostly incurred when institutions like the IMF
loaned money knowingly to dictators who spent the funds on alcohol and Parisian
shopping trips. In multiple African countries, the IMF has demanded an
increase in exports, meaning farmers are told to grow cash crops for
sale in the West rather than staple foods for sale domestically. So,
much like during the potato famine in Ireland, when food was actually leaving
Ireland and being shipped to England even as people in Ireland starved
to death, famine in Africa is usually concurrent with food being shipped
from the starving country to countries where people are largely not
starving. It's just that the food is too expensive for the starving
people to buy.

So you're sitting at home, watching news clips of people starving in Africa (assuming there isn't something more important going on
in the news that day to push a famine off the newscast). You want to
help. What can you do? My advice is to follow these rules:

1. First do no harm. Many types of aid are
helpful (more on that later), but many types are not. Donating goods
can often undercut local businesses and economies and put people out of
work. Imagine if aliens dropped five million pizzas on Oakland
tomorrow. How would local pizza store owners and employees feel about
that? Giving to organizations that are involved in political situations
is also very dangerous unless you trust that organization to properly
understand the context in which it is working. Invisible Children,
producers of the "Kony 2012" video, is a perfect example of this. In
their (obviously accurate) push to denounce Joseph Kony, they have
essentially promoted the Ugandan government and the Sudan People's
Liberation Army as "good guys," which is not so obviously accurate. If you don't want your donated funds to go to warlords or to put people out of work, do your homework first.

2. Change your government. There are five
concrete things the United States government can do right now to
dramatically change the lives of millions of Africans. Stop supporting
dictators. Forgive odious debts. Change farm policy. Demilitarize on
the continent. Support renewable energy to prevent climate change.
Nothing we as individuals can do compares to the impact of those five
actions, and it's not even close. We have a democracy in this country,
albeit a flawed one, and even if you don't have your own Superpac, you
can still lobby your government to make change. If that seems daunting
and you just want to write a check, there are organizations working on
those very issues that could put those funds to good use. Jubilee USA works on the debt issue in a highly effective and economically efficient manner. 350.org
works on climate policy. It's not as fun as flying into the jungle on a
helicopter loaded with food supplies, but it's a lot more effective.

3. Give in sustainable ways. There are some
methods of giving that are more effective than others. I am on the
board of directors at Bridges of Promise, a non-profit that helps to
fund school fees for kids in rural Tanzania, and one problem our
students face is that they don't have enough school supplies. Rather
than donate 100 boxes of pencils, Bridges of Promise gave money in the
form of a small business grant to a Tanzanian entrepreneur to open a
stationary store. The end result is that families don't have to travel
five hours by bus to buy supplies, local people gain employment, and if
any kids still can't afford to buy pencils, donated funds can be used to
subsidize their purchases. When giving, ask yourself: how would this
donation impact a community as a whole? Why is this giving needed? If I
were poor, would I want this type of giving done in my community here
at home?

In the end, it's never a guarantee that anything we do to
help will in the end actually be helpful. But transforming the world
in which we live is impossible unless we act with both an open heart and
an open mind. Whether or not dropping food on people from helicopters
is a good idea probably depends on the circumstances. What is constant,
however, is the fact that if we worked to change American policy toward
Africa, we could stop debating how to feed and clothe people who would
not need our help being fed or clothed, if only our government stopped
funding their dictators, ruining their climate, and demanding they pay
back money they never borrowed in the first place. Essentially, people
in the west are donating money to Africa in a desperate attempt to paper
over the vast destruction done to the continent by western
institutions.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

The United Nations announcement that it is sending an "intervention
force" to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is sparking debate
once again about the role of the UN and its peacekeeping missions in
conflict zones. This force will have a mandate to attack rebel groups
rather than just defend civilians, an aggressive step aimed at
preventing further war crimes in what is now the deadliest conflict
since World War Two. Many people might read this news and ask whether
or not the UN should get involved in a situation like this and whether
or not a UN peacekeeping force is capable of doing any good. These are
good questions to ask

At the same time, this announcement raises a much more fundamental
question about the United Nations and its role in the world; while the
UN sends troops to quell the violence in the Congo, after all, some of
its most powerful member states continue to support the countries
responsible for the violence in the first place. And so we are left to
wonder: if the United Nations is not the collective voice of its member
states, then what purpose exactly does it serve?

To answer that question as it pertains to the DRC, we
must first take a step back. The conflict in the DRC is the product of
both malicious and inept foreign intervention. French support for
Rwanda's genocidal government in the early 1990's helped spark a killing
spree in that country that was more ruthlessly efficient than the Nazi
concentration camps. American, French, and British inaction on the UN
Security Council ensured that UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda would
be unable to stop the killing. The American government was so desperate
to avoid sending troops to Rwanda because of the public relations
nightmare that had occurred when US troops were killed in Somalia just
months earlier (i.e. Black Hawk Down) that it refused to call the
genocide a "genocide:"

Elsner (Reuters): How would you describe the events taking place in Rwanda?
Shelly (State Department Spokeswoman): Based on the evidence we have seen from observations on the
ground, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred
in Rwanda.

Elsner: What's the difference between "acts of genocide"
and "genocide"? Shelly: Well, I think the—as you know, there's a legal definition
of this ... clearly not all of the killings that have taken place in Rwanda
are killings to which you might apply that label ... But as to the distinctions
between the words, we're trying to call what we have seen so far as best as
we can; and based, again, on the evidence, we have every reason to believe
that acts of genocide have occurred. Elsner: How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Shelly: Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to
answer.

The Rwandan genocide then directly led to the beginning of
the Congo conflict. A French intervention aimed at saving Paris'
genocidal allies allowed massive numbers of refugees and armed militias
to flee into what is now the DRC, all at the invitation of the West's
favorite kleptocratic dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. Rwanda's new
government then invaded in an effort to wipe out the genocidal armies
arrayed against it and funded a Congolese rebel army that marched
thousands of miles to Kinshasa and toppled Mobutu. This is known as the
First Congo War.

But it is the Second Congo War, beginning in the late
1990's, that still rages today. Rwanda and Uganda, capitalizing on the
weak government in the DRC and the geographic distance between its
capital on Africa's western coast and the resource-rich hinterland in
the East, began attacking the DRC again, ostensibly to fight the
remnants of the genocidal militias, but with a far more sinister motive
in mind: resource extraction. Rwandan and Ugandan backed rebels
massacred civilians, looted valuable minerals, employed slave labor and
child soldiers, and even in one instance took apart an entire factory
and moved it across the border into Rwanda.

All the while, Rwanda and Uganda have continued to be the
darlings of Western governments and corporations. Foreign companies
have profited from the conflict in the Congo, in some cases even doing
business directly with murderous rebel groups. Rwanda and its clean
streets, female-heavy legislature, and environmentally conscious
leadership is supported heavily by Western countries and wooed, often
patronizingly so ("a functioning African state! Oh my!) by Western
companies and religious groups.

If this doesn't make much sense, it's because in one
fundamental way, the United Nations itself doesn't make much sense: if the UN is the collective voice of its members, why does it so often intervene in ways that conflict with the actions of those members? It
is not clear what level of success the UN will have in the DRC, though
it's easy to be pessimistic about its chances. It is also not clear
whether the deployment of peacekeeping forces in general is the best
method for protecting innocent people and bringing an end to conflicts.
What is certainly clear is that supporting UN peacekeeping missions
gives powerful countries a means for appearing to proactively support a
peace process without actually having to take the difficult step of
interrupting the business of capitalism and resource extraction.

And so the UN force arrives as a band-aid on a gaping
wound. If the UN fails, as it has so often in the past, it will
certainly be roundly criticized by those who consider it weak and
inept. But perhaps that is not fair to the UN. International
institutions are, after all, only as good (in any sense of that word) as
the countries that run them. The irony is, then, that what would make
the UN a force for good in the world is if its member states were forces
for good. But if the conflict in the DRC teaches us anything, it's
this: if the UN member states were forces for good, we wouldn't need a
United Nations at all.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

The bombing last week in Boston is a tragic reminder of the
pointlessness of violence. Whatever political agenda the alleged
bombers had, it is difficult to see how it could be advanced in any
meaningful way by killing an 8-year old boy. If the motive was indeed
related to America's conflict with segments of the Islamic world, the
bombing is yet another example of the failed strategy of killing
innocent civilians in retribution for western government policies; the
response to such killings is usually just an intensification of those
very same policies. Just ask a Palestinian.

At the same time, beneath the dominant blanket of media
coverage focused on the attack, there are Americans asking questions
about the manner in which the Boston bombings have been treated in
American society. Why is it that the three tragic deaths in Boston
received such a disproportionate amount of media attention relative to
the fourteen tragic deaths at the site of the fertilizer plant explosion
in Texas? If the answer to that question involves the distinction
between murder and natural disaster, then why do routine
triple-homicides in America's inner cities not receive similar
outpourings of grief? And how would the media be covering the Boston
attacks if the perpetrators had been native-born Americans protesting
U.S. tax policy rather than immigrants protesting U.S. foreign policy?

At the heart of these questions is a very simple
perspective: our media's obsession with this case and with the Muslim,
Foreign, Chechnyan, Immigrant, Jihadist brothers at its epicenter
demonstrates a very skewed perspective on the value of human life and on
the unity of the human race. The enemy is defined as anti-American
terrorists. If "we" is defined as Americans, then this makes sense.
But if "we" is defined as humanity, then a very different enemy needs to
be identified.

That enemy is violence. Violence, in all of its forms, leaves a path of hatred and destruction in
its wake. A path of dead children and grieving mothers and broken
lives. This notion isn't merely the expression of a particular
political, religious, or even spiritual ideology, but rather the
acknowledgement of a central truth: for every instance in which violence
has allegedly made life better in some way, there are literally
thousands of instances in which violence intended to do good has
destroyed lives. This is a practical argument. Violence, as an
ideology, as a tool, has failed.

So if we as Americans
can identify violence and all of its manifestations (Sandy Hook,
Boston, the streets of Chicago) as the real enemy, then we are faced
with a very simple proposition: Either we believe a dead Congolese
child is just as important as a dead American child, or we don't.
Either we believe that the families of dead children in our inner cities
suffer a grief just as powerful as that of the families of the suburban victims in Aurora, Colorado, or we don't. Either we believe that Palestinian lives are
as valuable as Israeli lives, that Afghan lives are as valuable as
French lives, or we don't. And either we believe that children in
Mozambique do adorable things and have nicknames and spend nights
looking up at the stars and wondering about the nature of the universe
and when they are taken from their families way too soon the loss their
parents feel is as debilitating and crushing as it would be if our
children were taken from us, or we don't.

If we believe
that, then our actions need to reflect it. Our media coverage needs to
reflect it. Our government's policies need to reflect it. If we as
Americans believe so highly in the value of human life, we should urge
our government to stop supporting dictators, to stop using drones to
attack funeral parties, to stop exporting weapons. We should pass gun
control measures that are supported by more than 90% of NRA members and
could curb gun violence. We should support economic policies that
decrease food insecurity in areas of the world vulnerable to famine.
Caring about human life has to mean more than just wearing a "Boston
Strong" shirt and shaking our fists at the terrorists.

There are
some cynical reflections on Boston floating around cyber space that in
essence imply that given the discrepancy in media interest between the
loss of white/American life and the loss of black/brown/foreign life,
perhaps we should all just care less about what happened at the
marathon.

No. We should care more.

Every
child's death should matter as much as 8-year old Martin Richard's. In a
photo released to the Boston Globe, Martin, who was killed in the
bombing attack, is shown holding a sign that says "No more hurting
people. Peace." Maybe that's partly what makes the death of children
so painful: in some sense, they are better than we are, because they
know so much less and yet they know so much more. They get it.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced Friday that it will recognize Somalia's government for the first time in twenty-two years, a sign that the country is starting to emerge from the anarchic hell it has known since the fall of the Siad Barre dictatorship in the early 1990's. (Barre's rule was nominally preferable to the anarchy: he once imprisoned medical students for building a hospital because it interfered with his corrupt business practices.) This headline ("IMF Recognizes Somalia"), however, says a lot more about Somalia's past than it does about its future. While foreign institutions have spent the past twenty years botching Somalia's nation-building and worse, the northern province of Somaliland has forged an enduring climate of peace and stability without any formal international recognition. All of which should lead us to question the dominant western narrative regarding Somalia, that of a nation in chaos desperate for international salvation.

The fact is, international intervention, beginning with the U.S.-led fiasco Operation Restore Hope in 1992-1993, made famous through the "Black Hawk Down" incident, has brought increased ruin for Somalia and its people. While numerous peace conferences failed to bring about a legitimate government that could represent the Somali people, U.S. counter-terrorism policies radicalized the Somali population and at one point led to the ouster of one of the few stabilizing forces in Mogadishu: the Union of Islamic Courts (ICU). After the ICU freed Mogadishu from the stranglehold of mafia-style Somali warlords, the CIA turned around and funded those very same warlords to kidnap suspected militants and hand them over to American authorities. Some of those so-called militants were nothing more than peaceful Islamic scholars, but as the Americans paid the warlords bounties regardless, the kidnappings continued.

A disastrous Ethiopian invasion, backed by the United States, the blow-back emergence of Al-Shabaab, and an entirely preventable famine followed. The ICU, whatever its faults, had cleaned up Mogadishu, re-opened its airport, and evicted the warlords. After the Ethiopians invaded, and then promptly left, Al-Shabaab took over large swaths of the country, further exacerbating the ensuing famine by denying access to relief agencies and even holding Somalis hostage in famine areas, preventing them from reaching refugee camps across the border in Kenya. All of this followed several decades of alternating U.S. and Soviet support for the brutal dictatorship of Siad Barre, support aimed at winning cold war allegiance regardless of the cost to the Somali people.

Today, as Somalia's government begins to finally establish the formal
trappings of a functioning state, western institutions are lining up to
offer their endorsement of its existence, in essence asserting that
Somalia is finally ready to be a mature and functioning member of the
community of nations. This paternalistic attitude would be insulting enough even without a recounting of the history of foreign intervention in Somalia. And such endorsements always come with self-interested motives in tow.

As the IMF re-engages with the Somali government, for instance, it does so with the
understanding that the Somalis will be paying back the hundreds of
millions of dollars they supposedly owe the IMF, money that was borrowed
during the Barre dictatorship. Those loans were almost certainly spent either to enhance the security system that repressed the individual liberties of the Somali people or to fund the corrupt patronage system that kept Barre in power, or both. The prospect of fresh IMF loans will undoubtedly be attractive to Somalia's new leaders, who will inevitably benefit from the influx of foreign cash in any number of ways. That the Somali people, impoverished from half a century of dictatorship and anarchy, will pay this ransom speaks volumes about the international system of finance that the IMF embodies.

Meanwhile, in the north of the country, numerous Somali clans sat down together almost two decades ago and worked out a peace agreement that led to the formation of the Somaliland Republic. Somaliland has democratic elections and is at peace, but is unrecognized by the rest of the world. No UN peacekeepers were needed to bridge the supposedly tribal and atavistic differences between its various clans. No IMF loans fund its economic development. Nobody really talks about it, either. Grassroots democratic peacemaking doesn't attract readers the way an article about, say, Madonna's spat with the Malawi government does.

The IMF "recognizes" Somalia. To paraphrase James Ferguson, institutions like the IMF cannot imagine how things can ever get better except through their own expertise. Somalia is a country that sadly needs many things. The IMF is not one of them.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

As opposition candidate Raila Odinga's challenge to Kenya's recent presidential election results
proceeds in the Kenyan court system, the international media continues
to dance around the issue of ethnicity or "tribalism," at times trying
desperately to avoid the "T" word and at times sinking into the depths
of racist stereotypes, intentioned or not. Michaela Wrong writes in the
New York Times, for instance, of the difficulty of writing about
Kenya's elections without talking about tribalism given the apparent
ethnic divide between the two major electoral coalitions. Mukoma wa
Ngugi criticizes Wrong in the UK Guardian, accusing her of
defending a "discredited analytic framework," and challenges western
media outlets to accurately cover African issues in a meaningful way or
risk being completely ignored by Africans generally. The general critique seems to be that the Western media seems to focusing intently on the so-called "tribal" divisions within the Kenyan electorate while breathlessly awaiting a repeat of the 2007 election violence, despite the fact that it seems unlikely to materialize. For the vast
majority of Americans, who likely know little about Kenya beyond the
"tribal warfare" narrative of the tragic 2007 elections that was
forwarded by the mainstream American media, the images of Kenyans
hacking each other to death over an election speak for themselves: "tribal"
or not, these are inexplicable events happening in an inexplicable
place that is beyond the realm of what is "normal."

All of this serves to further alienate human beings from one another
through the time-honored method of ignorance. To the extent that
journalists should know better and report better, it is their fault.
Wrong notes in a dispatch for the New York Times, for instance,
that she is constantly told that "we Kenyans are totally tribal." She
correctly notes that this "tribalism" is not "irrational" but fails, in
her defense of the term as it applies to this election, to ask why
Kenyans might vote along ethnic lines. If it is not irrational, then
what is the rationale? Is it because they hate members of other
tribes? Or is there a better explanation that the media might need to
convey to the world and in particular to the west? Kenya's electoral
violence stems not from primitive tribal blood feuds but rather from a
system of governance created by Kenyan elites and western institutions
and made possible by arbitrary colonial boundaries. Or, as Wrong
herself writes quite accurately, "What Kenya desperately needs is an end to a political culture that treats state resources as a winner’s preserve rather than national assets benefiting all citizens equally."

In many post-colonial
African countries, a system of governance labeled "The Politics of the Belly" by famed academic Jean
Francois Bayart developed in which state resources became the personal
reward of those in power rather than the assets of a society at large.
This is not so different, of course, from the corruption that suffuses
government across the globe, but is unique in the historical context in
which it developed. African dictators, armed, funded, and defended by
either the Soviets or the West during the heart of the cold war, came to
view external resources (loans, grants, aid) as their cash cow.
Developing a domestic economy and encouraging the creation of a middle
class would spread the wealth and encourage the growth of rival actors
who might challenge the throne. And so in Mobutu's Zaire, Bongo's
Gabon, Mugabe's Zimbabwe and, yes, Moi's Kenya, those at the top learned
to keep the West happy and to use the funding that followed to buy off
enough politicians, generals, and businessmen to maintain power.

When many of those dictatorships transitioned to multiparty
democracies, largely in the 1990's, these systems of patronage remained in
tact but altered their form. Instead of buying fealty, elites began to
buy votes, and to create a spoils system that might hold together a
coalition of voters. These coalitions became, not surprisingly, largely
based on ethnicity, not simply because ethnicity is a cheap method of
coalition building, but also because a prisoner's dilemma quickly
emerged: what happens if I don't appeal to ethnicity and my opponent
does? To ask whether the Luo truly hate the Kikuyu or the Kalenjin is
akin to asking whether the French really hate the Germans or vice
versa. It sure seemed like it in 1942, and it sure doesn't seem like it
today. Which means something else is going on. The would-be winner of
this year's election, Uhuru Kenyatta, is a Kikuyu and his running mate, William Ruto,
is a Kalenjin. After the 2007 election, it was Kikuyus and Kalenjins
who were fighting each other; Kenyatta is under ICC indictment for
allegedly organizing the killing of Kalenjin women and children. Ruto
is under ICC-indictment for allegedly organizing the killing of Kikuyu
civilians. Now they are running together. Most of the violence in
2007 was far from spontaneous and was planned by politicians in
conference rooms. Tribalism? Really?

If Kenyans do indeed vote along ethnic lines, it is not mysterious, nor is it
"tribal." Kenyan UC Irvine Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong'O notes that the
real winner in an election in which two politicians who have been
indicted for war crimes won more than 50% of the vote is former dictator
Daniel Arap Moi. Moi, writes Thiong'O, who wrote his first novel on
toilet paper from inside one of Moi's prisons in 1978, destroyed Kenya's
institutions and created a corrupt one-party state. When multiparty
democracy was instituted, Moi used violence to intimidate the opposition
and retain power for another decade, setting the stage for the corrupt
ethnicity-based coalition system we see today. Moi's regime was
underwritten by years of western support in exchange for his loyalty to
the capitalist cause, just as today's Kenyan government, despite
ill-advised admonitions from American officials, will receive American
support for its war against Somali militants, regardless of its own
violence and corruption.

This is not as easy to write about as is "tribalism." Those
Africans are cutting each other up with machetes again...all because one
tribe got more votes than another tribe, can you believe it? In the
United States, of course, we are far more civilized. Our presidential elections have no racial element to them. Our citizens do not kill each other over religion or race or sexual orientation. And when an
American citizen decides tragically to slaughter innocent women and
children, he does not stoop to the primitive use of a machete: that's
what semi-automatic weapons are for. If there's one story the media
should further in explaining Kenya's elections to the West, other than
explaining why such "tribal violence" happens in the first place, it's
the story of the sad side to universal humanity. The sad trait that we all share: our willingness to seek power by any means necessary. When people kill each
other because of their differences, there's almost always something else
going on. This is as true of Kenyans as it is of any other people, no
more, no less.

About Me

I am a graduate of the University of San Francisco's master's in International Studies Program, where I wrote my thesis on Odious Debt in Sub-Saharan Africa. This site will focus on African issues, particularly debt, politics, and U.S. foreign policy. I hope you find it interesting.
email: andrew.hanauer@gmail.com